


a horsehead in your doorway

by darthjamtart



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Community: tw-holidays, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:59:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthjamtart/pseuds/darthjamtart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was not part of Stiles’ plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a horsehead in your doorway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mistfarer (matchstickbox)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mistfarer+%28matchstickbox%29).



> Originally posted at the [Teen Wolf Holidays](http://tw-holidays.livejournal.com/23466.html) exchange on livejournal.

This was not part of Stiles’ plan.

His left knee is twisted at an odd angle, and the barely-healed gouges down his right shoulder blade feel like they’ve reopened. The too-smooth portion of his left arm, still red from last year’s fire, is liberally peppered with small scratches and cuts. His torso is a mass of bruises, and in some clinical, detached portion of his brain, he’s calculating the possibility of the internal bleeding killing him before the creature in front of him has a chance to finish the job in a more hands-on style, so to speak.

Stiles blinks, slow and careful. His eyelids feel heavy. _Blood loss, shock,_ he thinks, and then, _oh._

There’s a woman crouched in front of him, soft fingers curling under his chin. Her eyes are dark and fathomless and she’s smiling, like she’s trying to be kind.

There is nothing kind about her.

Stiles offers her a tired smile in return, because there’s no need to be rude, is there? “Well,” he rasps. “It’s possible I miscalculated a little.”

“I wanted your whole pack,” the woman says, and her voice is too silky, too...something, to be quite human. She sighs, tilting her head. “I’m so hungry.”

“Pack orgies are every other Tuesday,” Stiles tells her helpfully, and her laughter is sweet enough to make his toes curl and his teeth itch.

“Humans just aren’t resilient enough to make for a satisfying meal,” the woman tells him, sounding almost regretful. “Killing you would practically be a waste.” She hums thoughtfully. “I suppose your pack will come looking for you soon enough.”

Stiles nods, thumbing open the vial in his pocket. “That’s true,” he says, aiming for cheerful, but everything hurts, and he can barely lift his arm to raise the vial to his mouth. He waits until she’s looking away, dark eyes searching out the werewolves they both know are coming.

He almost spits out the liquid, but that really would be a waste. He takes a ragged breath, then reaches out to catch the woman’s attention.

“As long as I’m going to die,” he says, “I might as well go out with a bang.”

She doesn’t laugh this time. “I’ve heard that joke before,” she says, and she sounds almost disapproving.

“Yeah, well, you’re my first succubus,” Stiles says. “I didn’t exactly get a trial run, here.”

“Your _last_ succubus," the woman, the succubus, corrects him. Stiles keeps his eyes open as she leans in, and he opens his mouth beneath hers when she kisses him. Her lips are soft and human and she draws in a breath, draws in _his_ breath – and freezes, choking, pulling back as her lips start turning blue.

“We’ll see about that,” Stiles says.

His eyes drift closed even as she lashes out, nails biting into his cheek, but her strength is fading even faster than his, now. Stiles should call for help, now that it’s safe for the pack, safe for Derek to find him, but when he reaches for his phone he can’t quite get his fingers to press any of the buttons. He’s so tired, and he’s been fighting for so long – nearly a decade, now, since he and Scott stumbled into all this supernatural shit – and he just wants to sleep.

***

Stiles wakes up in a hospital.

It’s not the first time, or even the tenth. The sheets are crisp beneath his skin, and the smell of bleach and antiseptic tickles his nose.

“I know you’re awake,” Derek says, in a misleadingly pleasant tenor. “And I would love to talk about what part of _no martyring yourself_ was unclear.”

“Why?” Stiles says without opening his eyes. “You do it all the time.”

“I’m—”

“The alpha, yes, we know,” Stiles finishes for him. “And she would have torn you to shreds and feasted on your heart and various other unmentionable parts of you that I, personally, would prefer to remain intact.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. They’d all seen what the succubus could do to an alpha pack; Derek alone, even Derek with all his betas, wouldn’t have landed so much as a scratch on her. And the poison that Stiles had concocted with Deaton would have been just as fatal to a werewolf as it was to a succubus, which significantly limited their options.

“I don’t like it when you’re hurt,” Derek says, after a long moment, and if Stiles hadn’t spent the last several years working with Derek and fighting with Derek and learning to recognize Derek’s moods when Derek really has only two working facial expressions, he might miss the anxiety threading through Derek’s voice.

“I don’t like it when you’re dead,” Stiles says shortly, because that had been a long two months, and they hadn’t even been together then. Derek lets out a frustrated huff. Stiles pats a hand invitingly on the bed, then splays his hand flat against Derek’s chest when Derek tries to lean in. “No kissing,” Stiles says, and he squints against the hospital lighting so he can look at Derek, make sure Derek is meeting his gaze. “Not until we know the poison is out of my system.”

Derek nods, and somehow manages to curl himself onto the hospital bed beside Stiles, his head on Stiles’ hip. There’s none of the aches and tension that Stiles used to expect from waking up in a hospital, and he knows that Derek’s been doing the werewolf pain-relieving trick, even though they didn’t know for sure whether or not the poison could slip through that way. He rests his fingers against the scruff of Derek’s hair and thinks _stupid sourwolf_ with an almost unbearable fondness.

***

He heals slowly, as always. There’s no cure for the reality of human frailty. Stiles has considered the alternatives, of course – impossible not to, with the offer permanently on the table. Stiles knows himself better now than he did at 16, when Peter gripped his wrist and told him he was lying. Maybe Peter was right, at the time, but Stiles knows exactly what he brings to the pack, and, perhaps more importantly, exactly what the pack would lose if he accepted the bite. Assuming he survived at all.

Still, Stiles thinks, idly, most of the time, but occasionally with purpose, that there’s nothing Derek would deny him. It’s a dangerous thought, because Stiles will sometimes ask for too much, push Derek too hard. Stiles has gotten better, over the years, at thinking his plans through, at contingencies, but he’s still too careless with Derek, still forgets, sometimes, that Derek is the last to speak up on his own behalf.

They’d scattered for college, years ago, and Stiles will never forget the first trip home he made, fall break, to visit his father. He brought cookies to the station, lingered by the water cooler for the latest gossip, and swung by the Hale house almost as an afterthought.

It’s not like they weren’t still a pack, weren’t still _Derek’s_ pack. But with all of them gone from Beacon Hills, it was like Derek didn’t know what to do with himself. Derek looked so lost when Stiles found him that Stiles didn’t even think before ordering Derek into his jeep. Weirdly, Stiles’ roommate hadn’t seemed to mind when Derek ended up sleeping on their floor for half a semester, but that was hardly the strangest sleeping arrangements Stiles had seen at their college.

And, well, it wasn’t like Stiles was unaccustomed to having Derek lurk around all the time. It was almost comforting, in a way.

The pack trickles home from college, from grad school, from internships and summers abroad. Erica and Scott are first, picking up jobs as a librarian and a vet, respectively. Scott pulls Stiles into a hug that’s more headlock than anything else when he sees the Hale house, only partially rebuilt but a solid foundation for things to come, and Erica arches an eyebrow at him but agrees not to give him any shit about his Derek-shaped shadow if he doesn’t give her any shit about her library science degree, which Boyd insists was a foregone conclusion and the rest of them find somewhat mind-boggling.

By the time the whole pack is back in Beacon Hills, the house is perfectly finished right down to the trim, and Stiles has picked up a half dozen exciting new scars.

“I can’t protect you when you pull these stupid stunts!” Derek yells at him, after hospital wake-up number six. It’s not even that bad, just a concussion and a few stitches over his ribs, and Stiles rolls his eyes.

“I’m not going to argue about this,” Stiles says, and Derek subsides, glaring. Later, when they go home, Derek touches him like he wants to be rough, wants to pin Stiles to the wall (the way they fuck between injuries, the way this whole thing started), but instead he channels his anger into bringing Stiles to an excruciatingly slow orgasm, until Stiles is swearing at him and tugging at Derek’s hair, hips twitching as he tries and fails to buck into Derek’s mouth, against Derek’s grip.

When he’s healed, when his knee no longer requires a brace, when the gouges fade to faint lines and the poison is gone from his system, he’ll let Derek express his anger in a way they’ll both thoroughly enjoy. For now, though, Stiles lets his fingers curl against the nape of Derek’s neck, and sleeps with Derek’s pulse beating strong, steady comfort against his skin.


End file.
